The Magician and the Spirits

by Deborah Noyes

  They exchanged about ten letters in two weeks. Houdini knew Spiritualism from the other side, a place of fakery and sleight of hand. Since his days as a fake medium, he hadn’t given the whole question much thought. But now, again, he did.

  Houdini and Jennie the elephant performing at the Hippodrome, New York, 1918.

  It may be that Doyle, the sort of legendary man of letters Houdini aspired to be, stirred up his competitive pride. Houdini was no slouch when it came to illusions and how they were constructed. He could make an elephant disappear, after all—and had, onstage in New York’s Hippodrome Theater, in 1918.

  A “mystifier of mystifiers,” he’d spent his life baffling audiences and his peers in the magic game. “I view these so-called phenomena from a different angle than the ordinary layman or even the expert investigator,” he argued, and he knew how possible it was to conjure spirits for receptive eyes.

  But in deference, and to smooth the way with Doyle, he held his tongue and played the role of willing convert. “I am seeking truth, and it is only by knowing that Analytical Minds are going in for it that I am treating this matter seriously.”

  Houdini was still in England playing the Brighton Hippodrome when Sir Arthur invited him to visit the Doyle family estate, Windlesham, in Sussex, where Houdini had lunch in their red-roofed gabled country house with Sir Arthur and Lady Doyle, Jean Leckie.

  William James with a medium, circa 1910.

  Strange Society

  Founded in London in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was an elite membership of scholars and scientists—pioneers in psychology, psychiatry, physics, astronomy, and other disciplines—who investigated topics like ghost and poltergeist phenomena, extrasensory perception (ESP), and hypnosis. The only major organization at the time committed to studying paranormal activity and human consciousness, the society attracted the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung.

  By 1885, an American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) was formed, with pioneering psychologist and Harvard professor of philosophy William James serving as president from 1894 to 1895.

  During the visit, Houdini performed tricks for what he saw as an unusually innocent (to deception) audience. He learned that Doyle believed he had conversed six times with his dead son and that Lady Doyle practiced trance writing, receiving messages from spirits through subconscious or “automatic” means. Houdini had his doubts on both counts but kept silent. He later described the visit in his diary. The couple’s faith was unshakable, he observed. Spirit communication was a fact, and there was “no possible chance for trickery.” Even hard evidence wouldn’t sway them.

  Houdini asked Doyle to recommend mediums, and Doyle agreed. He didn’t expect Houdini to dispense with reason but simply to keep an open mind.

  “My mind has always been open and receptive,” Houdini insisted. But on the evidence, in private, he didn’t believe.

  “Something must come your way,” Doyle assured, “if you really persevere and get it out of your mind that you should follow it as a terrier follows a rat.”

  Houdini swore to visit the mediums humbly and sincerely, without prejudice.

  IN SPRING 1922, DOYLE AND HIS FAMILY CAME TO New York on a North American lecture tour of New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Toronto, Detroit, Toledo, and Chicago. Sir Arthur gave several presentations at Carnegie Hall, at least one of which Houdini attended, though it would be three weeks before the friends met again one-on-one.

  Sir Arthur’s New York visit caused a sensation—with wildly mixed reviews.

  A big, broad, plainspoken man in a double-breasted suit and gold spectacles, Doyle was no entertainer. He had come to New York to spread the gospel of Spiritualism. But his talks reeled in some of the largest crowds Carnegie Hall had ever seen. On April 12, 1922, at the first of his six appearances, 3,500 people packed in, many claiming standing room. The hall hummed with women in mourning clothes, some with gold stars pinned on to show they had lost a loved one to the terrors of modern warfare: trenches and tanks, machine guns and poison gas.

  According to some reports, Doyle commanded the room at once with his gravity and gentleness. His sturdy bulk, walrus mustache, and lilting Scots accent put people at ease, despite the eerie mood of the evening.

  He told of parting with the Church while still a medical student, and of training as a doctor and eye specialist. But now, Doyle said, the skeptic was returned to wonder. He knew a little something about detective work, he joked, and this case was closed. He spoke of “the Etheric Body” and the afterlife, of the scientific evidence for survival.

  He shared his own experiences: of making contact, “beyond any doubt,” with his mother and other lost ones at séances. His son, Kingsley, a soldier wounded at the Battle of the Somme, had died of pneumonia in a London hospital right before peace was declared. Sir Arthur had heard again his dead son’s voice through the channel of a spirit medium.

  The New York World concluded: “In spite of the imagination of his writings, he seems to be a downright person. He does not look a man who could be easily stampeded. His audience was profoundly attentive. Evidently it was a crowd which had its dead.”

  Other reviews were harsh: could this believer in ghosts be the same man who gave the world the singularly rational Sherlock Holmes? Critics used words like “pathetic,” even “senile.”

  These mean-spirited observations were a harsh echo of Houdini’s own doubts, which would soon crack the surface of their friendship. Sir Arthur was a brilliant man, Houdini admitted, “a deep thinker, well versed in every respect.” But his influence, Houdini feared, could mislead countless others, if that great brain were misled:

  No statistician could fathom the influence [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle] has exerted through his lectures and his writings or number the endless chain he guides into a belief in communication with the Realm Beyond. . . . It is impossible not to respect the belief of this great author.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his family in New York, April 1922.

  During the tour, the Doyles invited the Houdinis to join them in Atlantic City, then a fashionable seaside resort, for a weekend getaway. “The children would teach you to swim,” Doyle offered, and Harry and Bess (who wanted but were unable to have children) took a room next to the Doyles’ suite in the Ambassador Hotel for two days in June.

  Harry entertained the children with magic tricks and showed off how long he could stay submerged in the hotel swimming pool. Later, while the Doyles’ three young ones splashed and played with a beach ball nearby, Houdini and the Doyles lounged in deck chairs and talked about Spiritualism and other topics of mutual interest.

  On Sunday, while the Hou-dinis were enjoying a bit of alone time on the beach, Doyle walked out with an invitation. Would Houdini like to join him and his wife in their suite for a private séance? Lady Doyle suspected a mediumistic message “might come through.”

  It’s interesting that Bess was not invited. Sir Arthur apologized for not admitting Houdini’s wife and closest confidant into the séance. Two people so alike in mind as Harry and Bess, he argued, might block incoming messages.

  The Power Behind the Throne

  Bess more or less retired from the stage early on to support her husband’s ambitions; she and Houdini were far from equals professionally. But behind the scenes, they remained partners in every sense of the word. She was central to his work and life until (and even after) the end. They traveled everywhere together, sometimes employing Houdini’s magical trunks to smuggle beloved pets in and out of unwelcoming countries. Bess rarely missed a performance, however dangerous and frightening for her. Houdini consulted her on all decisions, and she saw to everything from finances to his personal hygiene. (Left to his own devices, Harry got a bit slovenly; Bess did her best to keep him in line and looking sharp.)

  Though loyal and suppo
rtive, willing to play second fiddle to the force of nature that was Houdini, Bess returned to the spotlight from time to time, usually to resurrect their classic Metamorphosis routine. In later years, she would characterize herself and other magicians’ wives as “the power behind the throne” and resume a stage career of her own.

  Bess Houdini, circa 1900.

  Did Sir Arthur worry the partners would unite in doubt and undermine the gravity of the proceedings? Or did he just believe Houdini would be more receptive alone?

  But in fact, Bess was no skeptic. She believed in ghosts; her superstitious nature even riled Houdini at times. The partners weren’t, as Doyle assumed, automatically of one mind on this topic. Would the outcome (or the historical narrative) have been different had Bess attended?

  Houdini hesitated, but curiosity won out in the end. He left Bess to her sunbathing and followed Sir Arthur back inside the Ambassador.

  With the hotel blinds drawn to close out the bright ocean sunlight, and writing pads and pencils on the table, he sat beside Lady Doyle as Sir Arthur bowed his head and uttered a prayer, calling for a sign from “our friends from beyond.” Doyle then covered his wife’s hands with his own. Was she ready?

  Lady Doyle withdrew one shaking hand and struck the table three times. Houdini, meanwhile, cleared his mind of all but “religious” thoughts. “I made up my mind,” he wrote later, “that I would . . . [give] my whole soul to the séance. I was willing to believe, even wanted to believe. It was weird to me and with a beating heart I waited, hoping that I might feel once more the presence of my beloved Mother.”

  Houdini did, in fact, believe in an afterlife—as had his rabbi father. What he didn’t believe was that the dead had reason or opportunity to reach back to the living. But he could still hope. And today he did.

  Breathing hard, Lady Doyle lifted a pencil. Her eyelids fluttered, and she quaked all over. Soon her hand began to fly across the notebook page as if on its own, jerking with tremendous energy, the other thumping the table as she scrawled strings of tall, disconnected letters.

  Houdini later claimed that the message ran fives pages; Sir Arthur, fifteen. But it was clearly meant to be from Cecilia Weiss, Houdini’s mother: “Oh my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I am through. I’ve tried, oh so often—now I am happy. Why, of course, I want to talk to my boy—my own beloved boy—friends, thank you, with all my heart for this. . . .”

  She was happy, she assured him. They would be reunited one day. It was different where she was: “nothing that hurts.”

  “I have bridged the gulf,” the script said. “That is what I wanted, oh so much—now I can rest in peace.”

  Doyle sat opposite, tearing sheets from the notebook as they filled up, “tossing each to Houdini,” who “sat silent, looking grimmer and paler at every moment.” Doyle reported later that Houdini left the séance “deeply moved.”

  In fact, Houdini was fuming.

  For starters, Lady Doyle had marked a Christian cross on each page of her pad. His mother was a rabbi’s wife. She would never have communicated with a cross. Second, Cecilia Weiss did not read, write, or speak more than broken English. She would have written in German or one of several other European languages she knew (though the Doyles would argue that spirits communicate in the native language of the medium; what’s more, psychics like Etta Wriedt, who spoke only English, could apparently channel spirit messages in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, Arabic, and other languages). Third, the day of the séance, June 17, was his mother’s birthday. Houdini felt she would have mentioned this.

  He “did not have the nerve” to challenge—or let down?—Sir Arthur, and held his disappointment in check. But Houdini brooded over the séance, and within months it would spell the end of their friendship.

  Houdini’s doubts were pooling into conviction.

  Good, honest, educated people—people longing to believe in a life after this one and to hear from their dead—had “surrendered themselves to belief in the most monstrous fiction.”

  PART TWO

  Methods and Madness

  FIVE

  “In the Light”

  “Some persons think the requirement of darkness seems to [imply] trickery. Is not a dark chamber essential in the process of photography? And what would we reply to him who would say, ‘I believe photography to be a humbug–do it all in the light, and we will believe otherwise’?”

  ~Dion Boucicault,

  IN DEFENSE OF THE DAVENPORT BROTHERS

  During Sir Arthur’s Carnegie Hall lectures, a deep hush fell over the auditorium when he dimmed the lights and began to project images on the screen by stereopticon.

  Spirit photographs, he told his packed houses at Carnegie Hall, were proof of the dead in our presence.

  “The darkness of the theater,” the New York Herald reported later, “the spookiness, the uncanny effects produced by the pictures and the impressive sincerity of Sir Arthur as he told the history of the subject on the screen had a weird effect upon the crowd.”

  Doyle’s presentations featured pictures by William Mumler, a Boston jewelry engraver and amateur photographer who had made a name for himself decades earlier.

  One March day in 1861, Mumler took an experimental self-portrait and developed the photographic plate, astonished to find a ghostly female face near his. He’d double exposed the image, imprinting or layering one image over another on a single plate of film. But with Spiritualism at its peak, and “being of a jovial disposition, always ready for a joke,” Mumler shared the mysterious self-portrait (plus extra) with a devout Spiritualist he knew, Dr. H. F. Gardner, who saw there a miracle.

  Harper’s Monthly from May 8, 1869, featuring an article about the trial of William Mumler.

  Spirit photograph with “extras,” 1901.

  Gardner put the image out on the Spiritualist wire with a statement from the photographer: “This photograph was taken of myself, by myself, on Sunday, when there was not a living soul in the room besides me—‘so to speak.’ The form on my right I recognize as my cousin who passed away about twelve years since.” A bewildered Mumler soon found himself a “humble instrument in the hands of the invisible host that surrounds us.” Like the “rapping” phenomena of the Fox sisters thirteen years earlier, what began as a harmless joke quickly assumed a life of its own.

  Convinced the photographer was channeling the dead, believers came in droves. He quit his day job and, for a round fee, churned out portrait after portrait with dearly departed relatives or celebrities hovering mistily in the frame.

  How to Shoot Spirits

  Spirit photography can be created on-camera or in a darkroom using basic techniques like double exposure (exposing the same frame of film twice), sandwiching glass or film negatives together during the printing stage, or (today) digitally manipulating the image.

  Houdini notes other methods in his book A Magician Among the Spirits, from the complicated—piercing a negative with X-rays in the developing stage—to the very simple: removing the lens cap and, with a bit of sleight of hand, holding a concealed object over the lens and blurring the focus. Snap a photo in secret before you take the “regular” exposure, and you’ve planted an “additional hazy something” on the sensitized plate.

  You may ask, how did pictures like this fool anyone? Keep in mind that photographic science was still new and mysterious, and a “willing” public had little cause not to trust their own eyes.

  Undated postmortem photo of a father and child.

  Controversy swirled around him. Prominent Bostonians who believed Mumler had reunited them, on film, with lost loved ones sang his praises, but one skeptic predicted, in the American Journal of Photography, that spirit pho- tography would soon be ex- posed as a “low swindle.”

  In fact, it was Dr. Gardner, the very man who had presented Mumler to Bost
on society as a powerful link to the spirit world, who first accused the photographer of fraud. Gardner was shocked to discover, after an 1863 sitting with Mumler, that the ghostly likeness in the picture with him was no ghost at all. Mumler was “palming off, as genuine spirit likenesses, pictures of a person who is now living in this city,” a woman who had visited the studio weeks before. When Gardner stepped up, other clients surfaced with complaints, and Mumler’s reputation in Boston collapsed in a heap, forcing him to resume work as a jewelry engraver.

  Postmortem Photography

  Almost as soon as the new technology of photography became widely available to the public in the early nineteenth century, people used it to record the dead. Today the idea of flipping through pictures of dead people is unnerving, but at the same time we take pictures—print, electronic, animated—for granted. We’re surrounded by them.

  Kodak gave regular families access to snapshots in the 1890s, but before that, if you had no artist in the family, and no money to hire a portrait painter, you could end up without a single likeness of a person you held dear. The idea that somebody you loved was gone—forever, and you with no way to remember—must have been beyond difficult.

  In many deathbed portraits, subjects appear to be sleeping peacefully, though a telltale rose or lily with a snapped stem in their grasp might hint otherwise.

  In November 1868, determined to get back to work as a spirit photographer, he moved his family to New York City and took a job with the William W. Silver Gallery. Some five months and five hundred spirit photographs later, he was successful enough to buy out Silver’s business. But the shop had scarcely changed hands when he was arrested and jailed for fraud.